Microsoft has released a small demo to give you a taste of what you can expect come November when the new Xbox LIVE dashboard goes live.
It seems like Microsoft has really thought this one through from the ground up. Because the new dashboard is so much different than the old Blades, some of the new features might take some getting used to. There’s no clearly labeled tabs which say ‘Marketplace’ and ‘Games’ anymore. Instead, they’ve been replaced with menu options such as ‘Game Marketplace’ and ‘Video Marketplace’. This is probably a response to the overwhelming amount of people who said the Marketplace experience was too cluttered. It’s true, it was hard to find things on the old Marketplace, so it’ll be interesting to see if this new Marketplace is any better.
Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, who is pretty versed in the way the console works, said that, on Monday, September 29, the Xbox Live service would be down for a whole 24 hours so that Microsoft could update it to accommodate the fresh features. When the service comes back up, there will be no new functionality, so do not get your hopes up.
Taking a look at the release schedule for the Xbox 360 games, it seems appropriate that Microsoft will be aiming for the first part of the month, to make sure that the launches in late November and early December will land on the new, re-designed service. Considering that this is a major part of the company's plan to promote its console as Christmas draws near, we might be in for a bumpy ride, with some glitches being almost inevitable.
Bookmarks